Federal Judge Agrees with Verizon (and AT&T Users) that AT&T’s 3G Does Indeed Suck

by James on November 18, 2009

att_verizon_3g_coverageVerizon may be getting its ass handed to them in the Smartphone department for the moment, and perhaps for the foreseeable future as long as Apple decides to keep the iPhone exclusive with AT&T but at least they have a network that works.

That doesn’t change the fact that Verizon’s “there’s a map” for that ads were truly inspired. As an AT&T customer I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry whenever I see those commercials, but mostly they just make me angry. Especially since I’m not only inflicted with AT&T’s sorry excuse for 3G, I’m in NYC which has the worst AT&T 3G reliability in the country.

The effectiveness of the ads was obvious considering how fast AT&T filed a lawsuit to try and get them yanked, claiming the lawsuits were “misleading”. A federal judge in Atlanta today declined to grant AT&T a temporary restraining order that would force Verizon to stop showing the ads.

In lieu of actually having a judge help them silence Verizon from advertising the truth, AT&T has decided to do the next best thing, producing an, “I know you are but what am I?” retaliation commercial which, sadly, completely misses the point.

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    Seesmic’s Twitter Web App is Hitting All the Right Notes

    by James on November 17, 2009

    Seesmic_logoAs a certified (or is it certifiable?) Twitter power user I am very finicky when it comes to choosing a Twitter client.

    For me, Twitter.com is out of the question. There’s just not enough going on. I have to click around to see my @replies and DMs. No columns? That’s a dealbreaker.

    When I’m at my computer and have a Twitter client open I want to be able to easily scan all of my activity. I want to see my @replies, search terms I’m monitoring and DMs easily. Seesmic’s Web App actually goes one step further and has already integrated lists! I can monitor my lists right there in their own little column. It’s enough to make this geek practically giddy.

    TweetDeck has been my go to desktop client for quite some time, but with the evolution of Twitter Web Apps I find myself using them more and more even when I’m on my own machine. It’s the same reason I’m such a Gmail fanatic, it’s by far the best web based email out there. Once a web app can compete, or beat a desktop client (for any application) my choice is going to be a web app because I like my experience to be the same no matter where I’m logging in from. It’s why I’m excited to see Seesmic starting to nail this.

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      Posterous Adds Built in Retweet and Flickr Compatibility Continuing Trend of Awesomeness

      by James on November 15, 2009

      I’ve been a huge fan of Posterous since it first launched back in 2008. I wrote a post here detailing my dry run using Posterous as my full-time blog.

      Since I wrote that post there have been a few major developments over at the Posterous camp. Perhaps the most profound change has been the opening up of the CSS for Posterous to allow you to change your theme or completely customize it yourself from the ground up.

      I’m still not sold that Posterous is powerful enough that I would feel completely confident in moving there full-time again, but they are definitely making some exciting headway. Two of the most recent announcements I’ve been really excited about are the Flickr integration:

      Just paste the URL, e.g. from the address bar:

      into a post or an email, and you’ll automatically get the Flickr embedded slideshow, shown below.

      and the Retweet functionality built into default themes.

      First you’ll need to go into your customize panel and activate the retweet button.

      Posterous3---Customizing-James-Poling_1258337868655

      Once you’ve done that you should see the retweets showing up on all of your posts. Not only your future posts but past posts as well. The implementation is top-notch as well. You don’t even have to leave the blogs comment page to retweet a post.

      James Poling - Sent via my iPhone_1258338186224

      The co-founders of Posterous have been giving the impression that there are a lot of cool new features coming down the pipes over the next few months. If one of those improvements is a more powerful web dashboard for publishing posts, I may be chomping at the bits to get over to Posterous full-time once and for all. Right now I’m still extremely excited to watch the changes unfold on my mobile blog jamespoling.mobi.

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        Is AT&T’s Terrible 3G Responsible for Blackberry Users being More Active on Twitter than iPhone Users?

        by James on November 15, 2009

        theresamapforthatCan AT&T’s 3G service be so bad that it’s actually affecting how people use their mobile apps? If recent data published by the siliconANGLE blog is to be trusted it may very well be.

        Although the iPhone went zooming past RIM in market share over a year ago, siliconANGLE says their research shows that over the past year the most popular mobile Twitter client was ubertwitter. Beating out both Echofon and Tweetie, two extremely popular iPhone clients.

        Ubertwitter is nowhere near as powerful, or as polished as either of the iPhone apps mentioned, but it does have one thing going for it that the iPhone apps don’t. You can use it on other networks. Granted this may be a bit slanted because you can get a Blackberry on literally any wireless network, but it’s still a bit shocking since iPhone users are supposed to be the power users of apps.

        I can say from experience, that while I am a Tweetie junkie, I rarely even attempt to use it unless I can connect to wifi or unless I just have a lot of time to waste and am actually hoping the painfully slow load times will help wile away the hours.

        If I’m not connected to wifi on my iPhone I almost always rely on texting to post to Twitter. It’s not even a reasonable consideration for me to try and open up Tweetie on 3G and try to get an update out.

        That’s one thing ubertwitter really has going for it, it’s streamlined to be an effecient, fast mobile Twitter client and actually even works pretty well on AT&T’s EDGE network.

        New York City has the worst 3G reliability in the country. It’s no wonder happy Verizon and Sprint customers are tweeting away on their Blackberry clients while us poor iPhone users are trying to count to 140 as we text in our latest tweets.

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          Social Media Statistics and ROI

          by James on November 14, 2009

          It’s often hard to get certain types of people to have an interest in developing a serious social media strategy if they can’t see an instant ROI. Many people still look at social media as some sort of free subscription product that should immediately bear the fruit of profits. Those are the people who will eventually wither and fall off of the vine of relativity as new media continues to grow and evolve.

          Is social media a fad?

          Social media ROI

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            How to keep your memories safe like an Enterprise-level organization on a recession proof budget

            by James on November 12, 2009

            I have a 19-month-old daughter that I have taken about a million pictures of since she was born. Obviously these photos are very important and extremely valuable to me and something that I hope to someday pass on to my daughter, so it’s my responsibility to make sure to keep them as safe as possible.

            Anything that you have that exists only on your hard drive is in constant danger of being lost forever. Is it likely to happen? Perhaps not, but trust me, you don’t want to be the one who finds out the hard way.

            I am a photo freak. I, like everyone else who owns any sort of camera, fancies myself an unpolished, amateur photographer. I love taking photos of what’s going on around me. I am constantly amazed at how easy technology has made it to instantly immortalize what is going on in at any given moment in time.

            I want to make sure that ever photo I take is safe. I have enough going on in my life that I don’t want to have to worry about whether or not I could suddenly lose every photo I have of my daughter if my hard drive decides to crap the bed.

            You don’t have to be a huge corporation to utilize backups and extra storage to keep your photos safe. Here are a few of the tools I use to do it.

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